


Garden at Sunrise

by OnTheSubject_of_the_Infinite



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV), Peter Pan & Related Fandoms
Genre: All the screwy dynamics that go with that, Concern but in a weird way?, It's Pan and Felix so, Light Masochism, M/M, Non-Explicit Sex, Possessive Behavior, Power Imbalance, Sadism, Self-Esteem Issues, Self-Worth Issues, Semi-Explicit Makeout, Very non-medically backed wound care, obviously
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-17
Updated: 2019-09-17
Packaged: 2020-10-20 07:57:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,209
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20671928
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OnTheSubject_of_the_Infinite/pseuds/OnTheSubject_of_the_Infinite
Summary: Felix's story begins and ends with Peter Pan. He's so lost in this whirlwind he doesn't evenwantto get out.





	Garden at Sunrise

**Author's Note:**

> I've had this thing on my drive for... ages. Figured I might as well post it? Is this fandom even _alive_ anymore? Ah well. Enjoy babes!

Felix can’t remember a time before Pan.

\--Or, rather, he doesn’t care to. There was a dreary, stone-brick building: an orphanage or an immigrant house or a private school, something lonely and milling with like-aged but not like-minded people. There was a night, maybe with pouring rain or thick white clouds, maybe not even quite dark yet, where he’d taken the demon’s hand (and everything that went with it) and never bothered to look back. The past doesn’t matter.

He stares at the clearing, flooded by like-aged believers, and allows a rare, contented smile. No one notices, but everyone would still jump to attention at his voice, raised or not. Felix doesn’t bother with it for now. Camp is running smoothly thanks to his plans and training and direction. It waits like a carefully completed chore for Pan to arrive and assess, approve.

Felix’s pulse thumps once, hard, at his throat. He narrows his eyes against a swath of sunlight and tilts his chin up into it.

The past doesn’t matter; his present and future are here.

* * *

“I never doubted you, Felix,” Peter grins, all teeth and bright eyes and flushed cheeks. He’s sailing on an adrenaline high, fingers twitching with a haze of eager magic.

Wind kicks up dead foliage around their boots, rattling the trees in a strange, natural percussion that mimics raindrops but dry, rippling instead of plummeting. The blond shuffles his now-bloody club onto a shoulder, letting a knife-edged smile of his own surface. “Peter Pan never fails,” he says, dutifully.

It’s almost a mantra, a proverb, at this point. It’s like ‘sorry.’ It doesn’t quite mean what it actually is anymore. This time, for instance, it means: _ you were right, and I am here, and it is because of you. _

Peter’s delight curls wider across his face, breath quivering on the edge of something high and far and fast. Felix feels that familiar, coveted zing in his veins, a spark across his knuckles and down his spine, courtesy of the emerald-eyed demon before him. His lids flicker.

* * *

Felix groans, fingers curling into the dirt and finding nothing worth holding on to. He shakes, temples damp with sweat, and holds still, muscles straining with the effort.

Pan’s sharp, focused stare is hovering nearby, playing witness.

The Boy digs his finger in again, searching for the bullet from a stray pirate pistol. Felix bares his teeth, balking the new recruit’s nerves.

Pan smirks, leaning against a tree.

Dimly, Felix knows this lengthy, mundane process is a scolding. Pan could quite easily whisk the bullet out himself. He’s angry under all that mirth. It shouldn’t last, though. 

The Boy withdraws his bloody grip triumphantly, lofting the metal ball like a diamond. He pours more stolen rum onto the lieutenant’s wound.

Felix actually screams this time, quick and irate and shivery. His breathing is punctuated by tight gasps and muttered, filthy curses that the younger boys would gape at (and then rush to teach one another).

A few feet away, Peter’s amused stare slides to his face, shadowed by something measuring and curious. His head tilts in consideration, and then he is gone. There’s no flicker of shadow or lick of wind to signal his leaving, but Felix knows. He feels the second that familiar presence is no longer tracing over him thicker than waves do the sea or clouds the sky. It’s not a sting anymore, but he feels it all the same.

This time, there is no whisper of magic to soothe nor delight him. He closes his eyes and drops his head into the dirt again, feeling his sweat cool and the island continue on around him, heedless.

* * *

A breeze, of all things, it what wakes him.

Felix startles in his hammock, still swaying. He rolls over the side without a thought. His club is in his hand. He draws his hood up before he even thinks to put the cloak _ on, _ and then he is creeping out of the tunnel to the main hub beneath Hangman’s Tree.

Pan is slouched in his scarcely used ‘throne’ at the head of the room, a leg thrown over the arm carelessly. The feathers and plants and spears behind his head serve well the dark look on his face. In the weak, flickering torch light, Felix swears (not for the first time) that his savior is a mythic beast come to damn them all with delectation in his eyes.

“Come here,” Pan orders, even though Felix is already moving. He stops before the elaborate chair, patient. The brunet’s foot bobs lightly, an absent tic. “Felix,” Pan begins, gaze swinging up to encompass his second in command, “You’d do anything I ask of you.”

“Yes,” Felix answers, even though it isn’t a question.

Pan cracks a lazy smile, a gift for the right answer. Warmth tickles the back of the taller Boy’s neck, a barely-there touch fleeting enough to strike an ache in his chest. Felix draws a quiet breath, holding still and blinking slow. A second gust, hot against the shell of his ear, is punctuated by Pan turning to hang both legs over the side of the throne, pleased. 

“Good.” 

Felix, knowing dismissal when he hears it, nods once and heads for the entrance. A patrol should let the night breeze calm his flushed skin.

* * *

The air closes around him, a hand fisted in the back of his cape, and Felix feels like he’s breathing shadows. There _ is no air. _ \--And then, just as quick, he is gulping lungfuls of familiar ocean wind, far from the little hunting party and the cause of his wound. 

Blue eyes dart up, frightened and confused. Green meets them, intent like a winking star in their deep, gem-stone depths. Peter’s under-eyes never bruises or line, always youthful and fresh-faced in his magic, demonic, immortal state. The only blackness to accent the irises is in his thick lashes and all-encompassing pupils.

A flash of teeth greets the blond, inching towards that precipice of something jagged and glorious once more. “Anything I ask.”

“Yes,” Felix gasps around the sudden burst of oxygen in his lungs, the dizzying wave of relief and euphoria, blinking hard.

Pan’s hand shoots out, delicate and cruel, and catches Felix’s in the center. He presses his thumb into the slash across the blond’s palm. There is a half-second where the taller Boy recoils. A swift, sharp look from the brunet stills him. Shadows curl around Felix’s frame, promising if he remains in place and plays along, threatening if he doesn’t.

Pan bares his teeth in something hungrier than a smile and rubs his fingerprint into the red seeping out slowly. Felix’s mouth twitches.

“Does it hurt?”

“Yes,” he says, unsure. His brow furrows, pulse starting to thud.

Air cracking with energy around them, whipping branches and debris, Pan takes the single step into his lieutenant’s space. Still crushing the cut hand in his own, the brunet lets his gaze trail over Felix’s face languidly. 

“Breathe, Felix,” he instructs, almost an after thought. Neither of them miss where those emerald pools are focused.

Felix inhales, all at once and desperate. (He hadn’t realized he was holding his lungs captive until then.)

Another spark of delight darts across the Boy King’s face, dark and satisfied with his test, and then he is gone, leaving electric fingerprints pressed into Felix’s ribs where the tendrils of his magic had been. 

* * *

Felix wakes for weeks on end with the sensation of Pan’s magic drifting away. It leaves twitchy fingers, static-charged skin, with each visit.

He digs his nails in. He wills the contortionist in his chest cavity to give it a rest. He pulls on his cape, grabs his club, and presides over camp and training like the obedient lieutenant he is.

Pan’s eyes track him from the corner of everything, curious and amused. Felix doesn’t know if he wants to float to the stars or drown himself violently in Mermaid Lagoon.

* * *

The touches disappear. Felix doesn’t realize how much he enjoyed them, needed them, craved them, until they are gone.

Pan can’t be mad because Felix has done everything he’s asked. He’s been a good solider, a good Lost Boy, a good right-hand. But the hole cleaved into his existence is palpable, like bitterness and sand grit over his every waking moment.

He realizes, belatedly, that this is what it feels like to be abandoned.

* * *

Like before, a breeze wakes Felix. This time, however, he doesn’t get the chance to grab anything. The chill closes around him, suffocating and gaping. He waits, aware this time of the teleportation. He still braces his hands on his knees, though, when he feels solid ground again. He will never adjust to the feeling of ceasing --for however brief a moment-- to exist.

The zinging, hazy sheen of magic dances around his throat, dipping into the collar of his shirt and, when met with only a thundering pulse, spreads across his chest and torso greedily. Pan is standing in front of him in the next beat, looking caught between satisfaction and fury. 

“Anything.”

Distracted, brain fogged with the residual effects of such sorcery and relief that it’s returned, Felix breathes out a dazed, “Yes,” damn near swaying on his feet.

Pan closes real fingers around his neck, dragging his face down and kissing him with ferocity. His teeth are sharp, his tongue insistent.

Felix relents to it all, skin swept in goosebumps.

Pan drags him until they’re against a tree. He hikes up Felix’s shirt, fingertips sparking with the adrenaline of leaping to a potentially grisly end. He licks the surprised, pleased sounds from the blond’s mouth, and then trails them back over his scar-speckled skin in wide, teasing stripes that end in angry purple marks from his feral pearly whites. Red lines from his insistent nails crisscross the blond’s back. Felix wavers in the tangle of pain and pleasure, hands nearly crushing the apex of the shorter Boy’s ribcage. 

“Down,” Pan orders, rough and out of air, and Felix drops like his legs were cut. 

The brunet goes with him, cheeks pink with excited victory, a cold gleam in his eyes. He drags the larger Boy over himself, mouth catching on Felix’s throat and jaw and everything else within reach. Felix feels more than realizes that a low groan bubbles in his throat. All the same, Pan presses a grin into his adam’s apple and squeezes his hips.

Felix ducks his head to catch a kiss, and then he shimmies a little lower, showing the same starved attention to his leader’s throat as he had been paid. Peter throws his head back obligingly, practically shaking out of his skin with triumphant satisfaction. His fingers knot in the blond’s hair, pulling now and again to get a muffled grumble, a surprised hiss that he can claim with an open mouth and enjoy without a drop of remorse.

With a hasty tug, Pan is ripping his lieutenant’s shirt and his own over their heads. Felix, knees bracketing the brunet’s hips, sits up to make things easier, tossing the worn cloth aside the same beat that Pan’s supple green-velvet-and-brown-leather top is gone. Both of them take heavy pants of air for a split second, eyeing one another, and then Felix feels the press of hot, zipping air on his back, pushing him closer to the emerald-eyed demon.

Pan’s legs hook behind the taller boy’s back, and he nearly throws Felix off balance when he yanks him down. The brunet rocks against him, the gesture nearly unconscious as he seeks greater friction, the edge of this cliff he seems determined to leap from. 

Felix reaches between them without a thought, mouth a hot, conscientious brush against Peter’s pulse as he unlaces the Boy King’s trousers and slips a hand inside. Pan arches against him, a needy, almost-angry, little exhale tumbling from his mouth. 

The noise reminds the blond that, though it might appear differently, Pan is entirely in control of this situation, that he has crafted and cultivated it to exactly his liking. It shoots a burst of heat through the blond, chased by the encouraging sparks of Peter’s magic as it careens through his veins heedlessly. 

* * *

Felix never asks, just waits and watches and complies. Distantly, he knows this is frowned upon, that he should have higher aspirations for himself and a greater dose of respect. 

But Peter’s grin when Felix does something clever sparks in his gut like magic, and that has to count for something. He’s rough, for certain. (No King made it anywhere with softness and love and everything precious and fragile like it.)

\--But, in the hazy afterglow, Peter is bare to Felix’s eyes and mind, an open book of a thousand pages of scratched notes, brilliant escapes, harrowing deaths, and bloody champions. Emerald can be plush, welcoming, in the same way blue-grey can be more than guarded sadness. Felix cards his fingers through dark curls, and he can see the thrum of eternity stretched ahead of them as it’s mapped in Pan’s head.

The past doesn’t matter; Felix’s present is warm skies, and his future is a red sunrise coming in on the wind from the cliff. He can’t wait to fall again.

[Fin.]


End file.
